From the Top

by Dani Collins

  She wasn’t. She was confused and sad and didn’t know who she was anymore.

  Until this year, she had known exactly who and what she wanted to be—the best female Alpine skier in the world. That’s all she had ever wanted.

  Did she want a baby, though? Children? A husband and a life baking cookies and washing socks? That had never been her aspiration, yet there was something incredibly appealing in the idea. If they were Nate’s babies and cookies and socks.

  He hadn’t wanted to marry her when she’d been pregnant with his child, though, so he wasn’t going to want her now. Did she want him to want her?

  God in heaven, she was turning into her mother. She didn’t need a man.

  She threw off her blankets and hit the shower to warm up, then texted Nate, ‘Up,’ as she was brushing her teeth.

  Thought I might come see you at lunch, but shit went sideways here.

  NP, she sent back. They weren’t dating. He didn’t have to account for his whereabouts.

  But her gloomy mood fell a few more notches into melancholy, knowing she wouldn’t see him.

  She dressed and went down for breakfast only to realize it was a weekday so breakfast had finished early. On the one hand, that was great. Aside from Marvin’s cheerful greeting from behind the reception desk, where he stood alongside a middle-aged woman and a fresh-faced young man, and the busboy who gave her a fatalistic shrug in the dining room, she didn’t have to speak to anyone.

  On the other hand, she had to make do with a blueberry yogurt and a boiled egg, which was all that was left from the buffet that was disappearing into the kitchen fast.

  Even Lina had moved on from the espresso bar to other duties, leaving Ilke with the stale coffee left in the Thermos at the buffet for the tardy and desperate.

  “Damn.” Glory came in as Ilke was tipping the Thermos, trying to coax out the dregs. “I was hoping I hadn’t missed breakfast. You want a latte or something?” She moved behind the counter.

  “I’d love a bloody Mary,” Ilke muttered facetiously. “But coffee will do. Thanks.”

  “A bloody Mary sounds fantastic. But I would only need a nap in an hour and I have so much work to get through. I’ll make you one if you want, though.” Glory pointed toward the lounge side of the bar.

  I can have alcohol, Ilke realized with a fresh pang of despair, and shook her head. “Coffee is fine, thanks.”

  Glory nodded and began to grind and set things to snapping and hissing.

  Ilke salted her egg and bit into it.

  “Vivien said you’re ready to get back to work.” Glory glanced at her for confirmation.

  Ilke shrugged. “Doesn’t look like I’m needed, though,” she said with a glance toward the crowd at the reception desk.

  “But you’re planning to, like, stick around? What about getting back to training?” Glory took the time to swirl the foam into a snail shell before setting it in front of Ilke. “Or do you have to wait before you go back? For physical reasons?”

  “No, I’m allowed to pretty much do whatever I want. The white circus is over though. That’s the World Cup circuit.” She stirred her coffee, mostly out of nerves, then was mad at herself because the snail had been so cute. “This is when I would normally organize my next season. My summer training would already be booked, but I canceled it all. I’m in this weird place where I feel like I can’t make a call without having to explain why things went sideways, but what am I supposed to do? Issue a press release that I had a miscarriage?” She lifted a falsely cheerful hand, like someone was taking attendance. “Unwed mother over here. No, no, not engaged. Barely knew him.” She made a face. “Sponsors want a more family-friendly story than sluts with unplanned pregnancies. I’m sure plenty already think it was a deliberate termination.”

  “Wow. That bites.” Glory finished making her own coffee then began efficiently rinsing and wiping down the area. “Can’t you just say it was an unspecified injury?”

  “They want details, to know it won’t happen again. It will become old news eventually, but I don’t have that kind of time. I could go back to Sweden, but it doesn’t change the fact I cleared my calendar. Getting everything back into place will be expensive and a matter of proving myself. Do you, um…” Ilke hated feeling like a supplicant “…need my room?”

  “It kills me to say this, but I don’t know. For the sake of my forthcoming marriage, I am leaving Dad and Devon to work out which rooms get finished in what order. They might as well tell me to drive into Haven blindfolded, but the control freak has told me not to try to control everything so…”

  “Rolf?” Ilke smiled faintly. “He’s just trying to free you up for writing, isn’t he? It’s nice that he’s so supportive.” Ilke had a quick flash of Nate’s oath of friendship last night. She wanted so badly to believe she could rely on him, which scared the hell out of her. She knew better. What if he let her down?

  “Rolf is such a giant marshmallow under that thick layer of bark, you have no idea,” Glory said, kind of dreamy and smitten. “But the truth is, it’s nice to switch gears sometimes, if I’m stuck. Which I am. So I’m as frustrated as you are that there’s nothing to do for Dad.” She stirred her own coffee. “I do have something mindless that you could help me with, though. If you want. It’s just putting labels on envelopes and stuffing them with books.”

  “Yours?”

  “Mom’s. Keep me company at least.” She jerked her head and led the way from the dining room.

  Ilke trailed after her carrying her yogurt and coffee.

  Glory paused at the reception desk where her father introduced a bright-eyed young man, Shawn, and the older woman, Yolanda. Shawn was working on his hotel management certification. This was only a summer job for him, but he was ready, willing, and eager.

  “Nice to meet you,” Glory said as they all shook hands. Then she said to her father, “If you love me, you will ask the kitchen to make us a couple of BLTs and send them up in the dumbwaiter.”

  “I shouldn’t need to prove it, but I am nothing if not a loving father and an attentive host.” Marvin’s bushy brows angled in empathy at Ilke. “Good to see you up and about, Ilke. Don’t worry about things here. Vivien has us staffed right up. I won’t need to prevail on you again.”

  Terrific. Now she felt like some Victorian dowager who had taken to her room in a harrowing decline. But he had promised a decent breakfast so she forced a smile and climbed the stairs behind Glory.

  Glory’s room was still as big a sty as it had been the day she’d come up here to tell her about Macy and Serge, complete with the massive hole in the wall still only covered by a plastic curtain.

  “So, um?”

  “Yeah. Rolf and I were fighting about how this is my space for writing.” She waved to encompass the bedroom area including her desk. “He wants this to be our bedroom because it has the best view. He said I should make his old room my office, but I reminded him that I claimed this space on day one. It’s where I write best. Plus, I’m in here all day, so I should have the best view. We couldn’t agree so we stopped talking about it. I stopped talking, which he hates.” She sipped her coffee. “That was before we went to Korea. Next thing I knew he was smashing through the wall.”

  “Rolf was? Or—”

  “It was him.” Glory nodded. “With a sledgehammer. He calls me the hothead, but he’s such a Neanderthal sometimes. We had a nice big fight about him scaring the shit out of me, but it got us talking again.”

  Glory bit the corner of her mouth as her gaze slid toward the bed.

  Not just talking, Ilke surmised, envious of them all over again. She and Nate had had passion one night, then animosity, and now she didn’t know what they had. He wanted to be her friend, which was something, she supposed, but it wasn’t what Glory and Rolf had.

  She wanted what they had. Deep down, in her heart of hearts, that’s what she longed for—a man who stood behind her and seemed genuinely proud of her and loved her enough to bust through walls for her
.

  Did she want that more than skiing, though? Because if she wanted that from Nate, she would have to sacrifice her dream.

  “Rolf made the executive decision that if this was my office, that would be our bedroom.” Glory pointed through the plastic curtain. “But he doesn’t want to give up his own room because it’s the second-best view. Yesterday, Devon told me he asked her what it would take to have a kitchenette built into the hallway, between our two rooms, so all of this could be connected in one big apartment.” She swept her arm in an ‘L.’ “She asked me exactly what kind of empire he’s building.”

  Ilke moved to the window. Sharp and glistening icicles on the overhang added sparkle to a postcard vista of intense blue sky over blinding white peaks. Snow clumped the trees below and the edges of the mountains folded into one another all the way into the distance where Haven sat against a flat, white lake. It was the epitome of the pristine, Alpine wilderness that had always called to her very soul.

  “It’s like a castle in the sky. If I had this, I’d claim it forever, too.” She sincerely wished she had a right to.

  “Thank you. I love being right. And just between you and me, I’m thinking that room will become our lounge and this will stay our bedroom and double as my office, if I can get this mess cleaned up. Can I show you what needs to be done?”

  “Of course.” Ilke turned from the window to take in the boxes and books stacked on the bed. “How did you wind up selling so many of your mom’s books?”

  “I didn’t. In a shameless attempt to ride my mother’s coattails with my own book launch, I promised readers a signed copy of one of mom’s books if they pre-ordered mine.”

  “How’d that work out?”

  “Way too well. It’s kind of gratifying to know she’s still so beloved, but it was insane of me to make such an offer. Partly I did it because Rolf and I were fighting about this space. I knew it was silly to hang on to these boxes of signed books, letting them clutter up this room. She autographed them intending them to go to her readers. It’s time to hand them out and move on.”

  “And your own book sold well?”

  “Far better than I expected. I made a bestseller list.” She looked upward. “Thank you, Mommy. But now I have this enormous task. Which I keep telling myself is a nice problem to have.” She showed Ilke the sheets of printed address labels and the boxes of padded envelopes. “My entire advance will go to postage, but here we go. Everyone gets a pen and a notebook and…” she held up a bookmark “…this brazen attempt to entice readers to buy my next book.”

  Ilke looked at the cover for Spring Fever, the follow-up to Blessed Winter. “That’s cute. What’s it about?”

  “A surfer from Hawaii gets a fever while traveling in Asia. He hooks up with the woman who nurses him. She has his baby and shows up the day of his wedding to his childhood sweetheart all broke and forsaken by her family because she’s pregnant.”

  “Families are the worst in romances, aren’t they? I think that’s why I relate to the heroines.”

  “Yeah?” She saw questions coming into Glory’s eyes and quickly deflected.

  “Are you going to do all the seasons?”

  “That’s how I pitched it. I have an idea for summer, but haven’t figured out fall yet.”

  “Is that why you’re stuck? What about an older couple? Autumn years?” She handed back the bookmark and started rearranging things into a more efficient production line. “Your dad and Vivien could be your inspiration.”

  “What? I don’t want to think about my dad having sex! With Vivien. Why would you put that in my head?”

  Ilke paused, having spoken without thinking, but now she worried she had outed the couple. “They’re close in age. I guess I thought…”

  “No. Ew. I mean, they’re entitled to—But no. I don’t see Vivien going for Dad. With those eyebrows? And he has never once shown an interest in moving on from Mom. Ew. I should have made the bloody Marys. I’m really in the mood to get hammered now.”

  Ilke bit back a chuckle, privately enjoying the fact that Vivien and Marvin were going to shock the boots off their kids at some point. She peeled her first label and carefully centered it on an envelope. Then she threw all the bits of swag in.

  “Like that?”

  “Perfect.” Glory wrote a brief note on a thank you card and tucked it inside the signed book. She added it to the envelope and set the package in an empty box at her feet. “One down, three hundred and seven to go.”

  “Why don’t you hire someone to help you do this?”

  “I just did.” Glory saluted her with her coffee. “Welcome to Team Cormer.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Marvin felt positively transparent. Why? It was perfectly natural for a man to get a decent haircut. The fact he’d let the barber trim his brows and get into his ears and nostrils didn’t make him a fusspot. He kept telling himself he was only trying to live up to the title of proprietor, the way his daughter had urged him to.

  He didn’t care about appeasing Glory or playing the part for guests, however. No, he was self-aware enough to recognize his motivation was an attempt to impress a girl. He was as anxious for approval as a pimple-faced suitor before prom, unable to forget their first kiss, even though it had been days ago.

  Three days when neither of them had said a word about it. Of course, he’d been gone all of yesterday, driving Rolf and Glory to catch a flight out of Billings. They were bringing home Glory’s new car when they returned. Marvin had taken the opportunity to visit a big-city barber and buy some new clothes.

  Now he felt as though he was declaring his interest with this suit, pinning his heart like a boutonniere in the lapel.

  He stood in his bedroom looking at the man in the mirror and didn’t recognize him. Somehow, mowing his hair down to a one had revealed old shots of bronze in the otherwise silver strands. He was so thin on top as to be nearly bald, but he’d been talked into owning it. Other men did.

  His belt hung at a slight angle. He still had a small paunch. He wasn’t thirty. He was nearly twice that, but when he stood up straight, most of his pot disappeared.

  He buttoned his jacket over it. Released it, then buttoned it again. He turned this way and that. Straightened his double Windsor and wished he hadn’t been so cheap with his shoes. They weren’t terrible, but they failed to live up to the hype of the rest of this costume.

  Was he being a fool?

  There was only one way to find out, but he dreaded going out there. His daughter wasn’t here to make comments, but there were plenty of whippersnappers who enjoyed a bit of cheeky banter. He was always a good sport over remarks that his hair looked like Doc Brown’s in Back to the Future, or his voice caused dogs to bark across town because it broke sometimes when he was excited. He’d been taking remarks like that on the chin through decades of teaching. He was comfortable being called a fool when he looked like one.

  It would gut him to be laughed at when he wanted to be taken seriously, though. By a woman.

  “Oh, my word, Marvin,” Yolanda said, turning at the sound of his footsteps to regard him from the reception desk. “Are you going somewhere?”

  “Just my office.” He took a cowardly turn through the door rather than proceed all the way to the lobby.

  Damn. Vivien was in here, sitting at his desk.

  At the sight of him, she took off her glasses and let them drop onto her bosom. “Well.”

  “Let’s hear it.” He shot his cuffs and smoothed a hand down to fiddle with the closed button on his jacket. It wasn’t one of those tailored things she had insisted he agree to, but it was flashier than anything he’d been seen in since his wife’s funeral. “I look like I’m auditioning for Miami Vice, don’t I?”

  “You look like a mafia don who orders hits over his orange juice and eggs.” She rose, but only to perch her hip on the side of his desk. Leaning on a hand, she posed, like a brazen hussy, and played with the arm of her glasses, drawing his gaze to the neckline of her
sweater. “Suddenly, being a moll or a madam seems like a desirable profession.”

  He swallowed and made a point of closing the door behind him with a firm hand. “I had the barber shave me with a straight razor.”

  She pretended to catch her breath at the danger of it, hand splaying over the tops of those magnificent breasts. She then beckoned him with a roll of her fingers. “Let me feel.”

  What are we doing, Vivien? That’s what he wanted to ask, but he moved closer and closed his eyes as she took her time stroking light fingers over his smooth jaw. Tingles raced down his back.

  “Like a baby’s bottom,” she murmured.

  He opened his eyes and caught her hand, reading humor but also what he hoped was sincere appreciation. He shook a little on the inside, afraid he was misreading things. “About the other day…”

  She dipped her chin, lashes up. “Yes?”

  “If I overstepped…”

  “Marvin.” She sounded the way women did when they were laughing on the inside. “I know where to put my knee if I don’t care for a man’s advances.”

  He subconsciously flinched and cleared his throat.

  “Was that what it was?” she asked.

  “An advance? Hell if I know.” He paced away a couple of steps, still not used to feeling such short hair when he reached to push his fingers into it. “I don’t want to be—” A joke. A convenience. Put on the shelf when she lost interest. Ignored. “This had to happen.” He faced her again and gave his jacket a little tug.

  “It did,” she agreed.

  “I’m not trying to raise myself up to your standards, if that’s what it looks like.”

  She frowned. “What do you mean by that?”

  “You find this all very provincial.” He waved at the office and window and ceiling. “This lodge in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Do I?” She sat taller.

  “Don’t you?”

  *

  Vivien pursed her mouth and looked down to move the mouse closer to the keyboard, wondering why she was taking offense to Marvin calling her a snob when it was absolutely true. Maybe because he saw it as a character flaw and she would rather have his good opinion.